Having some issues with a new build, any suggestions?

I finally decided to upgrade my old PC and go dual core, but I've been having problems with the new build. Right now I'm completely stuck without a solution, so here I am asking for help.

First of all, here's the spec of the system I'm building for myself.

1 x Asus 7950GX2 1GB PCI-E
1 x OCZ 2GB (2x1024MB) DDR2-800 PC2-6400 CL 4-4-4-15 PLATINUM XTC EDITION REVISION 2 DUAL CHANNEL KIT
1 x Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4ghz - Skt775 Fsb1066 4mb Cache Boxed In
1 x Antec Phantom 500GB Atx12v V2.01 500w 20or24pin Psu
1 x Gigabyte Intel SKT775 965P/ICH8R, FSB1066, 2CH DDRII800x4
4 x Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar SE 250GB 7200RPM SATA2/300 16MB Cache

Here's my problem - I can't get the motherboard to post. Nothing appears on the screen, but all the fans spin up on both the CPU and graphics card. Here's what I've tried:
- Removed everything except for the CPU, RAM, and graphics card.
- Tried removing the graphics card and replacing it with an old PCI GeForce, still nothing.

Right now, I have no idea what's wrong. I'm guessing it's a motherboard issue, but I have no other compatible hardware to test it out with. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

 

Does the computer beep when powered on? If so, how many times?

 

No beeps whatsoever. (And the speaker is plugged into the motherboard, should be working fine.)

Also, I tried resetting the CMOS with no luck.

 

I had this same problem and it was with my RAM. Try taking out one of the sticks of ram, and if it still does it, take the other one out and put the first one back end. If it still doesn't work, see if any of your friends have some spare DDR2 RAM you could borrow (make sure it's 533/667/800 though).

 

Hiya, I also had this problem with a pc i built for a customer, it turned out to be the ram faulty. Have you got any spare DDR 2 ram you can try.

 

Try one stick of RAM and try it in the different RAM slots.

 

These symtomns are all to common, and can happen for different reasons, for me I hadn't plugged in the ATX_12V connector, for others it's the ram - luckily I bought ram that was on the manufacters compat list

 

I did some research, and found that this is the exact behavior you get when you don't have any power supplied to the ATX 12V (2x4) power connector.

Out came the multimeter, and sure enough the problem lied in my power supply - There was no voltage at all on the 12V 2x4 wires. I replaced the PSU today, and all seems to be working perfectly.

Now I have a new issue, hard drive performance. When I go to set up my RAID array in the BIOS, the setup screen is so slow to respond to my keypresses. Not a huge problem in itself, but when I finally create the array and start a Windows installation I get the blue screen of death when the "starting windows" message appears (before the installation).

Not being able to get past this problem, I scrapped RAID and just went with a single drive installation. As soon as I disabled raid it worked fine, although the installation was a little slow. Now I have Windows running on the machine I find that file transfers between hard drives are at least 5 times slower than my old PC. Any ideas?

 

It turned out to be the OCZ ram I was using. There was nothing wrong with the ram, other than the fact that is had undocumented compatibility issues with the P965 chipset - I found that out after I tried a second DQ6 board with no luck, and had the same issue with an Asus P5B Deluxe board I bought for testing.

Luckily a BIOS update on the Asus board fixed the problem, although even running the latest BIOS on the Gigabyte board was no use - I had the same problems.